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My Book Blog

About Me

Author of The Escaped Moments, Jaasindah Rafiq Mir is an insatiable reader, a consistent
reviewer of books, an irregular blogger, a lover of poetry and wishes she could
go out for coffee with John Donne and Mirza Ghalib someday. Living with her
mother and her brother in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, she is pursuing her
degree in English Literature and Psychology. Apart from reading and writing,
she loves being in solitude, gulping down as much of yoghurt as she can, and
watching any movie starring Amitabh Bachchan. Jaasindah also runs her own
little book blog called J R Loves Books.

My Bookshelf !

Yes, this was the first post I wanted to write on
my blog once my exams were over. Now that I am done with them, albeit not so
greatly, I want to give a little vent to the bottled up feelings of mine about
the so great, so exalted The Mallinson
School, popularly known as Mallinson Girls’ School, Srinagar.

I wish someone else had written this on their
blog, or anywhere for that matter, two years ago when I was thinking of
enrolling myself at the said school. It could have saved my life. But, of
course, we rarely get such saviours in our lives.

I don’t think that I can save many a lives by
blabbering here on Sensible Scribbles, for not many will see this post before
getting themselves an admission in the 10+2 department of Mallinson Girl’s
School. But I hope that someday, at least one- just one person would read this
and save her life by deciding against going to MGS. If I save that one life, I
will feel that I have saved the humanity.

For all those people who went to the doomed school
with me in the years 2011 and 2012, I am sure that most of you, if not all,
will agree with what I am going to write here. If I made an effort penning it
all down here, you too ought to do your part, girls. If you know anyone
planning to study there at Mallinson in the coming sessions, save them. Tell
them how you coped through the two years. Tell them what it is like to be a
“Coerced” Mallinsonite for two whole goddamn years. Save a life. Spread this to
the world.

Before I go to the points touching the caption, I
would want to tell you why I joined the school:

1.The name of
the school was big. The top scorers came from Mallinson. Taking into
consideration a few statistics of a couple of previous years, I thought that
the Mallinson girls get great marks in
boards however they perform.

2.I knew that
the 10+2 department of Tyndale Biscoe (The Boys’ Wing of the Institution,
together known as Tyndale Biscoe and Mallinson Educational Society) would never
hold a class after twelve noon. At times the guys were out as early as ten
thirty. Just three hours of school seemed a wonderful idea. Heavenly.

3.I went to
Kothibagh Goverment Girls Higher Secondary for a fortnight and was as
frustrated with it as anyone could be. Loneliness, creepiness, the government
school stereotypes at Kothibagh killed me. Mallinson had to be better than
that. Absolutely!

4.I was told I
would learn a lot from the girls at Mallinson than I would learn from the
Kothibagh peers.

5.I’d
quarrelled with the Mathematics teacher at Kothibagh (She was a woman! A
married woman teaching Mathematic! IMAGINE!!!). I hated the sight of her. I
didn’t want to spend a year seeing her face.

I was so, so glad the day I got myself enrolled at
Mallinson Girls’ School. I was on my way to excellence. I was on my way to
fulfil my dreams. But only if it were true.

Two years at MGS have given me the worst
experiences of life. It taught me so much (through the bad that it inflicted
upon me), and it took so much from me.

On the basis of these experiences, I give you this
list. Ten Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Go To The Mallinson School....

10)Poor Infrastructure:

Yes,
I was told this before that Mallinson is so primitive with respect to its
infrastructure, but I thought it won’t matter at all. I was going there to
study, not hanging out in the campus.

But
trust me, sometimes the infrastructure is all you want to ease your pain, when
you want a silent moment, an Only-Me
moment. You won’t get any place to spend time with yourself because Mallinson
doesn’t have any. Every place at the shrunken little campus is overcrowded all
the time.

If
that doesn’t seem a great thing to you, then I’ve got a bigger point to add. If
I am to describe the 10+2 classrooms in one word, it would be WAREHOUSE. The classes are poorly
ventilated, utterly, utterly small, with extremely uncomfortable seats and
colours on the walls that you would only associate to that of Mental Asylums. A
day in the class in enough to give you a depression for a lifetime.

9) Library (Can we call it that?):

The
Mallinson Library is the worst place a book lover can go to. At first sight it
would appear like a makeshift Hogwarts Dining Hall with just one row.

You
can’t read the books you want to, in the library. They are all locked up.

Keeping
the library books apart, if you get your own book and want to make use of your
spare time by reading a little in the library, they won’t let you in. Because
they goddamn won’t have the place to accommodate you.

I
once asked the librarian to let me sit in some corner and study physics from
the book that I had in my hand. I was told, “This is a school library. Not a
public library that we would let any student in. We don’t have enough place
here.”

The
library is as small as you can imagine. It is just very small to be called one.
Really very small. They call it “Champak Library” (after the children’s
magazine Champak that they give the students to read)

8) Late Date-sheets:

You
will have to write a billion exams at Mallinson. But that is not a problem
until you get the datesheet in time, even if it is a week before exams. But no!
That doesn’t happen. At Mallinson, or at Biscoe for that matter, you will get
the schedule just a day before exam. For instance, if you have your exam on
Monday, you’d get the calendar for exams on Saturday. Until that time, you
won’t know a single thing with surety about your exams.

7) Loss of Identity:

It
won’t take you more than a week to realise that you are a nobody at Mallinson.
You aren’t acknowledged for your good, ever.

There’re
only two ways you are remembered. One, being extra ordinarily obedient to the
egoistic lot of teachers, and being extraordinarily disobedient to them. I
respect the latter more.

Your
marks are also a very important thing to get you a recognition (You have to be
the class topper for that, else it doesn’t matter whether you’re the second
highest scorer or second least scorer. You get the same respect). It doesn’t
matter to the teachers if you’re the most genius girl in the class. You are the
topper, you’re the best. You aren’t the topper, you’re nothing. Hell with your
genius.

6) Inexperienced Staff:

Whether it be your mathematics teacher
(woman, again!) who doesn’t know the trigonometric table, your chemistry
teacher who prefers to say “Cathode Ion and Anode Ion ” rather than “Cation and
Anion” because he doesn’t know how to pronounce these, or your English teacher
who thinks “undoubtly” is a word in the real sense, explains “Bewilderment” as
a synonym of “Amazement” and gives grammar examples with a horse in every sentence, you will find yourself surrounded with
ignorance at the school. Every teacher is worse than the other and there is no
scope of improvement because the even the preferred recruits are the ones who
have some prior (read: retired) experience. Or by chance, if they recruit
someone young, it just takes a fortnight for the newer ones to become like
their older counterparts in behaviour and in intellect.

5) Partiality and Bias:

All the students are not the same in the
eyes of the administration. If you are the one in their good books (having
great marks, and showing ultra obedience) and you do any damn thing against the
rules, you’re still saved. They’ll “Beta this shouldn’t happen again” you and
forgive you. But if you’re not the topper and have a little life outside the
slavery to the teachers, and you the same thing the topper did against rules,
you’re dead. They’ll peel off your skin. Your parents will be called and you’ll
be humiliated in every way possible to them. Even your parents are not spared.

4) Prehistoric Professors:

The
teachers that you have would be a billion years old. There’re just a couple of
Biology teachers who are below forty, who are equally bad, though. I being a
Mathematics student didn’t have a biology teacher. But I never heard any good
about them from the bio students ever.

You talk
about experience with age, but had there not been anything wrong with aged
people working, the government would not have been giving them a retirement.
This bunch of teachers is absolutely impatient. Entirely contrary to what the
behaviour of a teacher should be like.

They’d still behave the way they did with
students back in the 1970’s or 1980’s. They need to understand that if you give
respect, you will take respect. They do neither

3)Bossy and Egoistic Administration:

The
administration of the 10+2 department is held by the Professors. Lady
Professors, to be precise- who don’t even know how to speak a proper
sentence. They won’t listen to you about
anything. If you’re wrong, you’re absolutely wrong; and if you’re right, you’re
still wrong. They won’t leave a moment to boss you around. Anybody who raises
their voice for the right has to be crushed. Their worst fear is anybody posing
a danger to their devilish unity. The female lot is worse than the male lot of
teachers. It sometimes makes me believe that woman is not one of the best
creations of God Almighty. Especially the egoistic women who teach. Your
individuality, your honour, your respect doesn’t mean anything to them. All
that matters is their supremacy- right or wrong.

2) Unfair Marking:

This
is the thing I hate the most about the school. You work damn hard, you write
your papers with so much of stress and in the end, you don’t even get half of
what you deserve. And trust me, this is so dejecting when this happens to you
personally.

You’d
still study well, once, twice, but not more than that when you have been so
consecutively marked badly despite studying so much. Working hard seems to
fetch no results then.

I already
told you the teachers are very, very old and they mark you the way they used to
do in their times- when they were hotshot professors (Yeah, right! Hotshot! My
foot!).

1)Nothing
like three hours of school:

If you’re with the thoughts that you’d be
spending three or so hours maximum at the school because the school is off very
early, you need to rethink about it. The Biscoe guys may be out early but for
Mallinson it is a completely different story. The difference between your last
class getting off and that of the rest of the school would be a maximum of
quarter an hour. So, it doesn’t make a difference whether you study there or
anywhere else. And the torture is truly not worth that half an hour of early
off.

Some of you might not be of the opinion that I have,
but then we should agree to disagree on the fact that Mallinson Girls’ School’s
Higher Secondary Wing is utterly useless and depressing.

Now if you ask me where one should do his
schooling in the 10+2 if not at Mallinson (or Kothibagh, because I didn’t quite
like it), I’d say nowhere. To be honest, I think Kashmir doesn’t provide any
opportunities for students to grow in these two years of their life. I don’t think
we really have any good schools for 10+2 in Kashmir.